Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VI. Publication or "Die Aetiologie"
216 ETIOLOGY We next find again a reference to the introduction of the anatomical basis of all medical studies into the Vienna School, with a summary of the history of the Lying-in Hospital from 1784, including the mortality from puerperal fever up to the introduction of chlorine disinfection. After Vienna we come upon a distinctly interesting reference to the practice of the Obstetric Clinic of the University of Buda-Pesth. It was in the forties that the anatomical direction was given to the study of medicine in Buda-Pesth. “ My predecessor, Hofrath Birly, formerly assistant to Boer, believed that the more favourable results obtained at Buda-Pesth, compared with the less favourable results in Vienna, depended upon the free use of purgatives, because in his opinion puerperal fever was produced by an unclean condition of the primes vies, and he delivered annually a full-dress philippic against Vienna, declaring that the high mortality of the Lying- in Hospital there was the result of neglect of purgatives. “ But as soon as medicine in Buda-Pesth assumed the anatomical direction, the purgatives lost their prophylactic virtue, and the Professorencollegium on one occasion, before I had the honour to be a member of it, had officially demanded the closing of the Obstetric Clinic even during the School-year. “ I cannot supply figures because the notes were lost during the Revolution .... but the facts are not contestable ” (p. 137). We have next several pages of statistics and repetition of statements with regard to the production of puerperal fever by conveyed infection, not by epidemic influence, with only an occasional graphic detail which arrests attention. “ My successor as assistant, Carl Braun, has written against my opinion. Carl Braun’s successor, his brother Gustav, demonstrated what opinion he held concerning the origin of childbed fever by his 400 deaths
